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Help us help refugee children Malawi get access to an educational materials
2023 Active Fundraiser — Thanks to our donors — A Success!
Thanks to our donors, we successfully established a new World Librarian instance in the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, housing 50,000 people. A video by the inspiring Toussaint Farini, a resident in Dzaleka, is here touring the building in Dzaleka called “Salama Africa” where requests for information are now starting to come in.
We partnered with Sofie Roux, a student at Stanford who designed and managed to get built a “Bloombox” — a solar-powered shipping container with an interior computer lab — that is now fully operational in the Dzaleka refugee camp. A Ted talk by Sofie on the Bloombox project is here.
Startup for this project — Bloombox, solar, computer lab, keepods and on the ground support by ShiftIT — cost approximately $70K USD. Amazingly, Sofie and her team raised approximately $60K to build the Bloombox. Thanks to our donors here, our UMass team raised the remaining funds for the Bloombox “internals” (20 laptop computers, a printer, and other incidentals).
The Bloombox installation happened in June 2023 at Dzaleka and in partnership with ShiftIT, Sofie ran a training program on how to operate the Bloombox and ShiftIt ran a workshop on how to use the computers, RACHEL device and how to send requests to the UMass World Librarians team.
We are now operational and are beginning to get requests from Dzaleka Bloombox users.
We continue to work to expand to other locations, working with our partner ShiftIT in Malawi and Waruk’s Productions in Kenya. We welcome donations to help us support their activities anytime. All funds we raise go directly to our partners in Malawi and Kenya.
Thank you!
How does World Librarians use the money?
The teachers and librarians use their own phone data to tweet requests to us, and to download the digital information we send them. We’ve calculated that the average transmission of data we send is roughly 800MB (videos, pdfs, etc.). In Malawi, the average cost to download 800 MB on a cell phone plan is about $8 USD. That’s a lot for the teacher or courier in Malawi to spend on trying to get data for their students, using their personal cell phone data plan.
But amazingly, through the use of the World Remit app we can add data back to their cell plans directly from UMass to reimburse them for their data downloading costs. We call this payment “digital postage.”
In order to access the content we search, each location needs a RACHEL. Expand the project to more villages and countries by helping us buy more RACHEL’s!
Keepods are only $7 and can act as a personal computer for each individual to download the content they want and access it on any laptop or computer. Help fund someone’s keepod!
Past Fundraising News!
Our first Minutefund crowdfunding campaign over fall 2020 was a success thanks to our donors!
We successfully raised $2500 to support our partners in Kenya, Net Bila Net, and wired them all the funding we received.
Our donor thank you video from our multi-continental team is below.